Home lender lied about loan specifics in addition to calling 5.4 million people on the national DNC registry

The Federal Trade Commission announced this week that it has won a massive civil penalty against Mortgage Investors Corporation for violating Do Not Call List statutes. The FTC says it won a $7.5 million civil penalty against the mortgage company for calling up 5.4 million numbers that are on the national Do Not Call Registry.

Mortgage Investors Corporation is said to be one of the largest financers of veteran's home loans. The FTC alleges that the mortgage company not only called consumers who were on the national Do Not Call Registry, but that it failed remove consumers from its call list when they asked and misstated terms of available loans during their telemarketing calls.

The people targeted were current and former U.S. military personnel, and the actions constitute a violation of the Telemarketing Sales Rule. The FTC says that the telemarketers misled consumers into believing that low interest, fixed-rate mortgages were available at no cost and often quoted rates to consumers that they implied by that would last the duration of their loan.

The FTC says that in reality the product the company was offering was an adjustable-rate mortgage where the payments would increase with rising interest rates and would require the consumer to pay closing costs. Mortgage Investors Corporation also allegedly misled consumers about its affiliation with the Department of Veterans Affairs.

The announcement of the $7.5 million fine came on the 10-year anniversary of the national Do Not Call Registry.

I have a simple solution for the DNC call list...do what they did with the FAX machine spammers.

Augment current law to allow for private citizens to collect/record calls from solicitors, sue the providers for $500-$1000 per instance with escalating penalties. Allow individuals to provide simple forms of evidence to support their case and the penalties will take care of the problem.

I remember back in the day, I knew a guy that owned a pager company (long ago) and he got sued because his marketing guy used a fax spammer. One person had something like 100 faxes and or more, I forget the number, but the penalty he was facing was in the several hundred thousands...I think like $300K or $700K. He would have been broke and out of business...and under the law he had almost no recourse. The proof was in the faxes...He paid some lesser amount, but it scared him straight.

I would love to be able to record the calls with a machine and track the caller's ID etc.

if they spoof the ID, then it's an immediate win in court, and make the remedy easy to apply. that would be great.

You would have people creating businesses to honeypot spammers and put them out of business.

Cox provides our landline phone service. We have "blocked" repeat callers. I can then go online and print out a list of those calls that were blocked and the dates and times they continued to try to call us. Easy.

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